Digging This!

A strange hawk on top of the K1 Caffe on the Ao Chalong pier in Phuket, Thailand. Taken with a Nikon D200 and a 18-200 VR lens on the 21st of February 2007. Part of the Thailand Chronicles Series.

I have used memediggers in the past, quite often. They are a good tool for the beginning bloggers and for bloggers trying to boost their traffic. I used reddit, del.icio.us, digg and nowpublic. Recently, the only service that I have been using in 2007 has been nowpublic, and that is mainly because of I was involved with the beta of the service.

Last year, I used to put custom icons at the bottom of each of my posts. Later on I realized from analyzing my traffic, that this was actually not worth the effort.

Naturally, I don’t plan on submitting all of my posts. I advise any blogger to practice some restraint. The digg mafia doesn’t like to be submerged with blogs that don’t relate to technology.

The Memoirs have been the object of two viral waves of traffic, generated by memediggers. The first one happened last year in June, I believe and generated over 10000 hits in a short amount of time. Since then, that post still receives some hits every single day, between 50 and a 100. It was a post on how to do HDR photography that was prompted by a comment from a reader. That post has received over 22000 hits in total.

In December 2006, while I was monitoring my wife’s blog when she commented on Britney Spear’s crotch issues, I noticed a sudden spike in traffic and posted my own article on the affair. In one day, that post generated more than 15000 hits and has since then been viewed more than 115000 times. It still receives between 150-250 hits per day, months later.

The first wave happened by accident and I analyzed it in detail. The second one happened when I actually manipulated the memediggers into generating traffic. It isn’t easy and one of the only reason that I did it was to generate more data on memetics and viral waves of traffic for my studies.